Letter to Secretary of State on warnings of rail engineering works

05 April 2018

In March 2018 Transport Focus wrote to the Secretary of State for Transport Chris Grayling MP, Welsh Government Cabinet Secretary for Economy and Transport Ken Skates AM and Scottish Government Minister for Transport and the Islands Humza Yousaf MSP about the rail industry’s commitment to provide passengers with information on engineering works six weeks ahead of time.

This followed an announcement in February that timetables will not all be correct 12 weeks in advance – a long-standing obligation – and that a temporary six-week target to get timetables right would apply instead. A Transport Focus investigation before Christmas exposed a number of failures to meet the 12-week target.

We enclosed the report we had provided to the rail industry following our monitoring – you can download this below.

We focused on three areas:
• whether the information was accurate six weeks out
• how well passengers were warned of known or possible errors in the information
• ensuring passengers were not left out of pocket where Advance tickets go on sale later than normal.

We are continuing this monitoring work, as well as pressing for the industry to get back to a 12-week deadline for providing accurate information as soon as possible.

Informed traveller initial findings 9 March 2018
Download
Liked it, or found it useful? Please share on social media and help spread the word!